The present application relates to displays of images from digital image files on various devices including but not limited to CRT, LCD, TFT, electro-luminescent, plasma, DLP, and more particularly to zooming in and out (zooming, panning) and multi-dimensional roaming of the displayed images at various levels of zoomed sizing. The images can be geographic (terrestial and astronomy), chemical and biological compound and organism structures, anatomical structures of plants and animals, graphical representations of complex data and combinations (e.g. data on demographic and resource distribution over a geographical area)—all of massive size but requiring fast zoom in while retaining a high degree of resolution.
There is a focus for purposes of this invention on images/image files larger than two gigabytes in uncompressed twenty-four bit RGB color space, but other images/image files can be handled beneficially through the present invention. High-resolution digital imagery has only been available to the general public for the last two years, but much longer in military and industrial settings. Systems available for general usage to view very large images in real time are very expensive and contain unnecessary technology for the task at hand. Current systems capable of loading/reading an image over two gigabytes in size will pass the image contained on the disk drive through a 3D graphics engine before displaying it. Due to the current speed limitations of these 3D graphics engines, the quality of the image displayed on the screen ultimately suffers. Current systems read the image from the hard drive as a bmp, rgb, or tif file.
The present invention has as its objects:                provision of an enabling technology for viewing digital images, including A/D converted images as well as digital originals;        viewing very large images with high resolution;        inherent scalability to server, desktop, portable forms;        portability for various hardware, software, and telecommunication channel sources of the data to be displayed with optional use of dedicated software or standard operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows NT, Unix (of various types) or Linux; and        reduction of disk (or other source) access times;        